Stage role: Paul Mescal with Patsy Ferran in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in New York, in February. Photograph: Sara Krulwich/New York Times Paul Mescal is to return to the Irish stage to star in A Whistle in the Dark, by Tom Murphy. He will lead the cast of the play, about an Irish emigrant in the English midlands who tries in vain to escape his violent family, when it comes to Dublin in 2027, after opening at the National Theatre in London.
The coproduction is being directed by the Abbey’s artistic director, Caitríona McLaughlin, who calls A Whistle in the Dark, which was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1961, “a taut, explosive, pressure cooker of a play”. It will be the first time that the UK National Theatre will have staged Murphy’s work. Mescal, whose first professional role was in The Great Gatsby, at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2017, appeared at the Abbey the following year in Asking for It, a dramatisation of Louise O’Neill’s bestselling book.
READ MORE Earlier this year he appeared on stage in New York in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire; he won an Olivier Award for best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski when the production ran in the West End of London in 2023. Murphy’s powerful and menacing masterpiece, which he wrote at the age of 25, centres on the Carney family visiting their emigrant son in Coventry, and their inability to escape tribal violence and twisted masculinity. The play is the best known and most performed of the acclaimed and influential Irish playwright, who died in 2018.
McLaughlin will also direct JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World for the UK National Theatre’s Christmas season this year, with an all-star Irish cast that includes Declan Conlon, Nicola Coughlan, Lorcan Cranitch, Megan Cusack, Éanna Hardwicke, Siobhán McSweeney and Marty Rea. McLaughlin said it was “very meaningful for us at the Abbey Theatre to have such fulsome engagement in this next chapter of the National Theatre of Great Britain. It will be an honour to bring Playboy of the Western World and A Whistle in the Dark before audiences in London.
Every generation deserves to see these two seminal works of the Irish canon.” She was “thrilled to take on these two great Irish plays. The Playboy of the Western World holds a special place in my heart because it is synonymous with the origins of our theatre and has such significance to the history of our art form. A Whistle in the Dark is a taut, explosive, pressure cooker of a play.
“Both plays hold in common the opportunity to reinvent yourself, the desire to realise one’s own potential, and what happens when that opportunity is squandered or lost.” Mescal, who is from Maynooth, in Co Kildare, and studied at the Lir Academy, in Dublin, shot to fame following his portrayal of Conall in Normal People, the 2020 television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel. He was nominated for an Oscar for Aftersun and last year starred in Gladiator II, directed by Ridley Scott.
